My parents and older sister were in town from Bethlehem yesterday, a bus trip they make every couple of holiday seasons. The last time they were here my younger sister from Boston and older brother from California were in town too, a little family reunion just months before my mother would be diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Through new treatments she is in full remission, though a new prop accompanied her on this trip: a cane to help with all the walking (and threaten my father with when he teases her).
We hit many of our normal stops: the Bryant Park shops, lunch at Connelly’s near my office, seeing a show. Over the years they’ve seen many shows including The Grinch, the Radio City Holiday show, and yesterday Wicked. And I finally got to show my father the Red Caboose, a model train and hobby store down the block from my office.
Electric model trains are a thing in my family. When they were all here a few years ago I took them to the train display at Grand Central. And my niece and nephew love them, as did I growing up. One Thanksgiving we took them to a place from my childhood: Koziar’s Christmas Village, which has a huge multi-track train display with tunnels and a village and miniature people. My brother had HO gauge trains, and I remember a Christmas Eve when he was sick and stayed home from church, putting up the smaller of our two train platforms in the corner of the rec room, two sides covered by that corrugated red brick cardboard, the green grass mat stapled to the platform’s surface, the tracks tacked to that.
My father’s train is an O-27 gauge and some years we’d put the larger platform up for his train to go round. This was when I didn’t have the platform covered with chicken wire and papier mache mountains for my Lego castle empire. Though I loved my dad’s train, I was always a bit more fond of laying out and putting Plasticville together, the town that the train circled. It’s my earliest obsession with city building and urban planning that still manifests itself in games like SimCity. Those little plastic buildings and Hot Wheels cars we used for traffic, the shrubbery and trees made from clumpy, spongy ground foam. Our visit to the train store yesterday got us talking about putting my father’s train up again, under the living room tree which we did one other year when I expanded Plasticville with some new additions I found online and at the hobby train store in Nazareth.
After my family left last night, I wandered through the Bryant park shops and found a train ornament. A 2013 addition to my tree to represent the family train stories. It’s a wooden, toy train, not the elegant black engine of my father’s train, but it does the trick in triggering the memories.
